The Art of Keeping Secrets (30 page)

They played a game: Jake would e-mail her a myth recast in present-day names and circumstances and make her guess what myth it was, what gods and goddesses the stories were about. Sometimes it would take a day or two, but she always figured it out. When she tried this game back at him a couple of times, he always had the answer in less than five minutes.

They communicated about everything and nothing—his search for a new school, her research on the dolphins, the weather, the equinox coming next month. They did not mention Bedford, Liddy or Annabelle or even his sister, Keeley. How long could they go on pretending these people weren’t part of the story?

After the FAA had contacted her about her mother’s remains, Sofie had taken her mother’s ashes to the seawall and said goodbye one last time by scattering them on the waves. This farewell had been more real, more complete than the memorial service two years ago. Somehow her mother felt truly gone now. Her echoing instructions and fabricated life floated away.

News sources were asking questions about her mother, and Sofie told them she’d known her mother was on the plane, yet she’d told them nothing else. The secrets were gradually being exposed.

Once, Bedford came to the house to beg for their reunion, in his own way, which meant telling her how wrong she was and how much she needed him. He could have been a stranger, a talking head on TV, for all the emotion he aroused in her. She smiled at him, and told him that it was funny how he always thought he knew what was best for her, but he’d never really known—not once.

She’d apologized to John, sought him out at the dock and asked his forgiveness for frightening him the day of her botched dive. She promised never to do it again. He’d stared at her for a long time and told her that the demons that had chased her to the bottom of the ocean would never leave her unless she released them. She’d mumbled something about appreciating him and his understanding.

The morning she was summoned to the research center, she drove to work with a knot in her stomach, the kind that made her think she might be getting sick. She took a seat in Andrew Martin’s office. He appeared unusually disheveled, his gray hair mussed, his baby blue button-down shirt wrinkled, his
Conservation Matters
lapel pin crooked.

“Okay, give it to me. What’s happened?” Sofie asked.

“I might as well shoot it to you straight, Sofie. Our funding has been cut.”

“What?”

“You’ll have to stop the work you’ve been doing. The center has all they need from your project, and the funding is being channeled elsewhere.”

“But . . . we can’t stop. We can’t make our case unless we understand the dolphin’s behavior.” Sofie’s voice shook.

“Yes,” Andrew said. “But we have to let it go. We have to stop the research . . . for now.”

“We can’t,” Sofie said in stuttering words, lifting her chin. “You can just tell the foundation that we aren’t done yet. We’re almost there . . . but not yet.”

“Sofie, we don’t have any choice. Funding has been cut everywhere. It’s not just our center and it’s not just your project. The time and money are better used elsewhere. We can give the National Science Foundation what we’ve got, still publish the results of the data you already have.”

“But I’m not done.” Sofie shook her head. “When does this happen?”

“Now,” Andrew answered.

“Will you find me another project to work on?” She held out her hands, began to count off the projects. “There’s the winter stock structure, the right whale habitat, the sea turtles and fisheries . . . any of them.”

“Sofie, I promise we’ll try and find more work for you as soon as possible. You can take the summer off, though. When school starts back up, we’ll find a place for you if you have time. But we have nowhere to put you right now.”

“I’ll do anything, Mr. Martin. I’ll stay off the boats. I’ll log data, clean the tanks. . . .”

He took a deep breath. “You’ve been working here nonstop since you were fifteen years old, Sofie. Go have fun for the rest of the summer. Please. I don’t have a choice. You’ve recently been in a terrible accident. Take some time off.”

“They saved me. Those dolphins saved my life and I have to help save theirs.”
They’re all I have left,
she thought.
All I have. I can’t let them go. . . .

Andrew rose from the table. “You have helped them, Sofie. You’ve done research that will make a difference in their lives, in understanding their behavior around nets and boats. But this particular study at this center is over.”

Sofie stood then and walked out of the room, her legs carrying her to the seawall before she had a plan, before she knew where she would go in this strange world in which she was free to do whatever she wanted. Her job was gone, her boyfriend dismissed, her mother dead.

Sofie listed the events that had brought her to this point, to this unbound life: one discovery of a woman on a plane, plus one art historian, plus one secret revealed to Jake Murphy. Adding those three events together could not, and did not, equal the number three, but a sum of greater magnitude than could be calculated with simple addition.

Sofie stood on the seawall and willed her dolphins to come. The water blinked in the glory of morning. Along the shoreline, pluff mud lay exposed and dark in the low tide, clumps of spartina sprouting from the rich almost-black mounds. Then the waves rippled, three dorsal fins broke the surface, scattering drops of water like silver confetti.

It took Sofie a moment to understand what the dolphins were doing as they circled a single dolphin in the middle. The pod was surrounding Delphin’s mate, Sandy. In protective unity, the dolphins pulled closer. They cried out to one another, danced around the female. Sofie swung her legs over the seawall and peered down; her breath caught with a cry of joy—a just-born dolphin calf swam below Sandy.

Sofie had been taught that dolphins were born tail first as the mother bent in the middle, that newborns were four feet long and weighed about forty pounds, that the calves were usually born between May and July, and that the fetal folds on the skin appeared to be stripes. Yet these facts did not explain the marvel of a newborn dolphin calf swimming next to its mother. Facts could never capture the full wonder of experience.

The mere facts of her life could not fully encompass who she was and whom she was going to become.

Sofie’s joy threatened to overflow in tears. Just as she had come to say goodbye, the pod was greeting new life. Delphin rose above the surface, nudged his nose toward Sofie.

Go,
she told him in her mind.
Go, take care of your new baby. Thank you for saving me . . . for knowing my name.

He splashed with his snout and then nudged his new baby toward its mother, where the calf would nurse and then get a free ride in the mother’s slipstream. Sofie exhaled with this truth—she had done the same thing: been carried along in her mother’s slipstream, living life beneath her mother’s fiction and fears. She would not travel that way anymore.

Sofie returned home to tell a story, one that would open the door to letting go. To the truth.

She typed an e-mail with slow, deliberate strokes.

 
Then she rose and stared out the window toward the water, toward all she was letting go at this moment. Then the ring of incoming e-mail made her return and sit again.

Sofie placed her hand on the screen as if she could touch Jake’s face. When she saw his initials like that, with the word “Love” in front of them, her heart ached for something she couldn’t label—like a distant land she’d once glimpsed but never reached.

Then she typed what she’d rehearsed over and over in front of the window.

 
She didn’t want to see his reply and learn that maybe he didn’t want her to come. She turned the computer off and yanked her suitcase out from under the bed. It was time to tell the story—not a myth, not a tale, but her story and her name.

TWENTY-THREE

ANNABELLE MURPHY

Jake sat on the front porch, tilting his laptop for the best reception on the wireless Internet. Afternoon shadows fell across the scuffed white floorboards. Annabelle came up behind him, hugged his neck. “Let’s make some decent use of your time—the porch floor needs painting.”

He turned to her as her gaze wandered down to his computer screen. He held his hand up in an ineffective effort to cover the words.

Annabelle straightened. “You’re e-mailing Sofie?”

Jake rolled his eyes. “Oh, Mom. Yes.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Nothing is ‘going on.’ We just talk. . . . She tells me about her work. I talk to her about all the stupid, boring things I’m doing while I decide where to go next. . . .”

Annabelle had to ask the question. “Has she told you anything else about her mother?”

Jake shut the laptop, stood up. “We don’t talk about it, Mom. Really, we don’t. It hasn’t come up since I left. I tried. Then I stopped.”

“Is she recovered from her hospital stay?”

“Fully,” Jake said.

Annabelle had been a scholar of her children’s faces since babyhood and understood even now that he was telling the truth. He wasn’t hiding anything from her. She stared at him, and then asked, “Is there . . . something between you two?”

“A friendship, Mom. A friendship. We like the same things and it’s nice to talk. . . .”

“I wish you’d told me. . . .” She turned her head to the ringing phone inside the house. “You could’ve told me.”

“You’ve seemed so . . . happy lately, and I didn’t want to bring it up again.”

She touched his shoulder. “I have to get that—I’m expecting a call from the newspaper.”

“Sure,” Jake said.

Annabelle saw the relief on his face that this particular conversation was over. She grabbed the phone a half ring before the answering machine came on. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m here. . . .”

“Oh . . .” A male voice, one she’d heard somewhere before, came through the line.

“Uh, who’s this?” Annabelle sat at her desk chair, turned on her computer to prepare for taking notes during the call.

“This is Michael Harley. I’m looking for Annabelle Murphy.”

Annabelle’s stomach plummeted. She tried to speak, but her words stopped at the base of her throat.

“Hello?”

“This is Annabelle. Hello, Michael. How are you?”

“I’m fine. . . . You’re a hard woman to find. I’ve been calling for two days.”

“You didn’t leave a message.”

“No . . . I didn’t think you’d call me back, so there really was no point.” He laughed, but she detected nervousness in it.

“How can I help you?” she asked.

“I’m in town.”

Annabelle closed her eyes, leaned back in her chair. The beep of the call waiting indicating an incoming call sounded on the line. “Listen, I have a scheduled call coming in on the other line.”

“Can I come see you?”

“No, I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Will you meet me at the Marsh Cove Art Studio?” he asked.

Annabelle sighed. If she didn’t meet him there, he might show up at her house, or continue to call. “I’ll meet you there in an hour.” Then without saying goodbye, she clicked over to Mrs. Thurgood’s voice.

The call was about expanding Annabelle’s role at the newspaper and possibly having her write a commentary on Southern life once a month in the living section. Annabelle focused her full attention on the call. When the conversation ended, she promised to think about Mrs. Thurgood’s offer.

First she had to meet Michael Harley at the art studio, where Liddy Parker had once lived and worked.

During the past weeks, she’d found comfort in her self-imposed isolation, in the simplicity of being alone. There had always been people depending on her, expectations to meet, obligations to fulfill, and these days of solitude had soothed her. Now she needed to put on some makeup, find an outfit and go out into the world.

Anger at Michael skirted her thoughts—he’d interrupted what should have been a sweet moment: a vote of confidence from the newspaper’s publisher. She stood and went to the front of the house and stared into the hall mirror, examining her appearance. “All right,” she said out loud, “let’s go.”

 
The art studio was situated between the Curiosities gift shop and the Sweet Tooth bakery. A sign lit by tiny white Christmas lights perched above the double wooden doors stated simply MARSH COVE ART STUDIO. There was a two-bedroom loft above the studio—Annabelle had visited there a few times to pick up Jake when he’d gone home to play with Sofie after school. Once, Annabelle had found Jake and Sofie on the floor with a huge piece of butcher-block paper and so many crayons that Annabelle remembered being stunned that Crayola even made that many colors.